This book was published almost at the same time as my book,
Refuting Compromise, so it’s hardly surprising that Ross makes
many arguments that are already addressed in my book. However, because his introductory
chapter was online and made false attacks against biblical creationists (aka young-earth
creationists/YECs) while playing the martyr, I have already critiqued the introductory
chapter in this article. And most of the claims I address
in this new article are covered in depth in Refuting Compromise chapter
7.

In his latest book, Ross tries to undermine the YEC teaching of variation within
the created kind. On pp. 123–4, he tries to justify a bizarre ‘fixity
of species view’ as follows:

‘Exegetically, the speciation debate focuses on the meaning of the Hebrew
word mîn, used in Genesis 1 for the different creatures that reproduce
after their own “kind”. Moses’ other writings (for example, Leviticus
19:19) indicates a narrow definition of mîn: “Do not mate different
kinds of animals.” This text implies that a forced mating of different kinds
of animals can occur but that such a practice would be against the natural order.’

Leviticus 19:19 says:

‘You are to keep My statutes. You shall not breed together two kinds of your
cattle; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor wear a garment
upon you of two kinds of material mixed together’ (NASB).

In all these cases, the word kind is not mîn at all, but kil’ayîm!
So Ross has actually tried to argue for a meaning of a word that is not even in
the text he cites! Such mistreatment of the Hebrew raises serious questions about
Ross’s credibility, but also that of church leaders so eager to support his
compromise—have they done any checking at all on Ross’s claims?

Kil’ayîm is the dual form of kele’ in the original
sense of separation. Hebrew has not only singular and plural nouns, but also the
dual, for exactly two, which is why the NASB is most accurate here. And the term
fits well with the YEC teaching that these different breeds Moses told the Israelites
not to breed were originally separated from a single created kind. That’s
why it would be possible to breed them.

The ‘YECs are hyperDarwinists’ canard

Ross uses even the most unreliable evolutionary sources to discredit YECs. He even
cites with approval someone as thoroughly discredited and Bible mocking as atheist
Ian Plimer, without any caveats. Many anticreationists
have charged that YECs must believe in evolution more strongly than evolutionists,
for example the atheistic non-biologist Dr Lawrence Lerner.
The basis is that we believe that comparatively few kinds of animals on board the
Ark gave rise to many more varieties.

Ross states in the inflammatorily named chapter ‘Young-earth Darwinism’
(p. 125):

Note first that in the introductory chapter, Ross professed to be the peacemaker
while complaining about how nasty YECs were to him. But here is yet another example
of the way he is only too happy to throw out insults against creationists.

Ross grossly misrepresents YECs in saying (p. 122):

Scientific advances on many fronts increasingly support an “interventionist”
(that is, miraculous) view of life’s origin and development [Ref. to his own
origin of life book]. Yet, increasingly, young-earth creationist leaders oppose
such advances as if these advances are driven by evolutionary ideology.

This is a bizarre statement, since CMI has a lot of articles opposing chemical evolutionist
theories of the origin of life and supporting the
design in creation. And as we have often pointed out, his billions of years
are totally based on geological and astronomical evolutionary ideology—see
Hugh Ross Exposé.

Ross continues

Perhaps the most stunning irony of the creation-day controversy lies buried―but
alive―in young-earth creationists’ literature. As the following paragraphs
show, those leaders who have levelled some of the most stinging criticisms at old-earth
creationists, accusing them of being evolutionist (theistic or otherwise) [ref.―
note how he here alleges that YEC leaders sometimes claim that OECs are atheists
(!)], are actually forced by their own interpretation of Scripture to be hyperevolutionists.
Their confidence in the efficiency of natural process evolution exceeds even that
of the most ardent, nontheistic evolutionists.

Ross manages to overlook our oft-stated simple explanation that not all variation
is evolution. Rather, for goo-to-you evolution to work, the variation must increase
the information content of the genome. However, the changes touted in most
evolutionary ‘proofs’ involve sorting or loss of information.
We have already explained how new varieties are produced by sorting out the information
already created, and natural selection reduces the information. See
How information is lost when creatures adapt to their environment. This
is even less excusable for Ross, because his own staffer Fuz Rana cited the very
article this came from, Bears across the world …,
in a radio broadcast—see this
section. We also published on the information issue in
What is Evolution?

My first book Refuting Evolution
has a diagram explaining variation within a kind by the well-known YEC term ‘creationist
orchard’ (see Contrasting the Models).
But Ross still persists in advocating a ‘creationist lawn’, while failing
to see the difference between the creationist orchard and ‘evolutionary tree’.

Ross’s charge of hyperevolution scores own goals

If Ross wants to charge YECs with believing in hyperevolution, then he needs to
make the same charge against members of his own camp. A fellow progressive creationist,
Robert Bradley, writing in a major work defending biblical inerrancy, agrees that
variation is not evolution:

God created the major types of animals and plant life and
then used process to develop the tremendous variety of life forms we observe today.1

So if creationists believe in ‘rapid evolution’, then so do some progressive
creationists. This shows that Ross’s ‘fixity of species’ view
is not even in the mainstream of his own belief system. His advocacy of this untenable
view unfortunately serves to bolster the efforts of atheists in denouncing YECs.

Furthermore, a major work of the Intelligent
Design Movement,2 in fact one to which Ross
himself was a contributor, published a chapter defining kinds far broader than species
by YEC microbiologist Dr Siegfried Scherer. Evidently Dr Scherer’s basic type
definition involving hybridization was acceptable to the ID people Ross often tries
to curry favour with, and who are mostly not YEC. Dr Scherer’s definition
of the ‘basic type’ included any creatures that could hybridize up to
the point of true fertilization, or could hybridize with the same third creature.

Hybrid hiccups

Ross tries to dismiss the hybridization criterion (p. 123):

Some young-earth creationists … point to hybridization experiments—lions
crossed with tigers to make “ligers”, dolphins with whales to make “wholphins”,
and goats with sheep to make “geep”—as evidence that “12
living genera might have all descended from the same created kind.” [Ref.
to Ligers and wholphins? What next? ]

The full context of this quote was referring to the wholphin alone:

Other genera in the group are much more alike than the two that produced
the offspring in Hawaii, which suggests that the 12 living genera might have all
descended from the original created kind.

That is, even such different genera within a family as the false killer whale and
bottlenose dolphin hybridize, so are part of the same created kind. Therefore it
makes perfect sense that the other genera in this family that are even more similar
are also part of this kind.

Ross continues:

One must ask, however, whether humanly contrived breeding experiments reflect
what occurs under natural conditions. According to those who study animal behavior,
they do not.

This last sentence is pure assertion. In any case, since when does Ross care about
consensus of biological opinion? If he went by majority vote in biology, as he does
in astronomy and geology, he would be an evolutionist!

In any case, what is “natural”? The wholphin was a surprise, not a ‘humanly
contrived breeding experiment.’ And the other animals mate quite happily if
they are together. The only reason they don’t normally mate is that they are
isolated from each other.

Ross misses the whole point about these hybridization experiments. He has no basis
to deny that animals that hybridize, especially if they produce fertile offspring
like the wholphin, are in the same created kind. Rather, animals like the false
killer whale and bottlenose dolphin show how much variety is possible by purely
natural means from the same kind—no one bred these creatures! All that was
required was the isolation of small populations with different fractions of the
originally created genetic information. Natural selection and sexual selection would
also have acted on these to ‘fine-tune’ the results, by removing more
information.

Origin of human people groups

Ross’s misunderstanding of genetic variation has baneful consequences when
he tries to explain the origin of human people groups (‘races’). These
can be explained by the isolation of small people groups when God confused the languages
at Babel. Each group contained a fraction of the total gene pool. This helped to
fix certain characteristics and produced the different people groups (‘races’)
we see today.

Ross correctly believes that the Babel division was significant for the origin of
‘races’, but makes a critical error in denying its sufficiency. He says
(The Genesis Question, pp.181–182):

The origin of humanity’s different racial groups remains a mystery.
Neither the Bible nor extrabiblical literature nor modern scientific research offers
a direct explanation. One fact we can derive from Scripture: racial diversity existed
from the time of the Exodus. …

This question cries out for an answer: How did the human species develop
such distinct skin colors and other more subtle differences in the relatively brief
time from the days of Noah to the days of Moses? The usual answer that it happened
in response to natural selection seems inadequate. …

Sun sensitivity works poorly as a selection effect. … Evidence of
how weakly natural selection favors one skin color over another comes from the observation
that dark-skinned Eskimos live in the Arctic and fair-skinned Greeks on the Mediterranean
isles.

These findings imply that natural selection cannot explain the development
of racial diversity over just a few tens of thousands of years. At the risk of adopting
a “God-of-the-gaps” approach, I can suggest an alternative explanation.

Given that Genesis 11 so explicitly describes God’s personal intervention
in breaking up destructive unity and in motivating people to spread through Earth’s
habitable land masses, God may have done more than diversify language at the time.
He possibly may have introduced also some external changes—those we recognize
as racial distinctives—to facilitate the peoples’ separation.

… God might have intervened … by miraculously introducing something
new, in this case new genetic material that would generate racial distinctives.

However, some simple genetics can easily explain the origin of racial features.
Rapid production of ‘varieties’ can be shown in humans: it is well known
that a marriage between a couple who are the offspring of unions between, say, African-Americans
and Anglo-Americans, who thus have a wide variety of ‘racial’ traits,
can produce children with a large variety of skin shades. Of course
it couldn’t happen quickly by evolutionary means, because evolution
must rely on random mutations to generate new genes, and slow substitution
over many generations to establish them in the population.3

This is why both Eskimos and native equatorial South Americans have mid-brown skins
instead of having developed very light or very dark skins—the relevant genetic
information is simply not present. Such ‘people groups’ today are highly
specialized, with less genetic variety than the brown-skinned offspring of African/European
unions (and Adam and Eve), which is why they produce offspring of limited variety.

But Ross postulates direct divine intervention at Babel to introduce ‘racial’
traits into separate populations. The Bible doesn’t even hint at this. Ross
admits that it’s a ‘God of the gaps’ explanation. This would be
unnecessary if he had understood basic creationist literature.

But more disturbing is Ross’s claim that God designed the different ‘racial’
characteristics to aid man’s dispersal. Ross makes it clear (and I accept)
that he is not intentionally endorsing any form of racial supremacy at all, because
he says:

This should not be taken as an indication that there is anything wrong in
different people cooperating and mixing, as in trade or marriage.

But his ideas do in fact smack of 19th-century racism. During that time,
some individuals refused to recognize the equality of all humans, especially when
it pertained to intellectual and spiritual matters. These racists believed that
not all races of humans had descended from Adam and Eve. Only members of their
race were thus blessed, and they considered it futile to send missionaries to soulless
dark-skinned people. Ross’s idea almost implies that God designed racial prejudice,
to aid separation at Babel.

Finally, his postulate of ‘extra genetic material’ seems to reinforce
the prejudicial notion that there are in fact substantial genetic differences, differences
in kind, between people groups. But virtually all modern geneticists acknowledge—due
to biological fact, not ‘political correctness’—that the genetic
differences are so trivial as to make the whole concept of ‘race’, when
applied to humanity, biologically meaningless. See also Q&A:
Racism and Refuting Compromise chapter 9.

Evolution of carnivory?

Ross bases one of his anti-YEC attacks on the YEC’s alleged claim that carnivores
evolved rapidly from herbivores:

According to young-earth teaching, animals ate only plants until the moment
Adam and Eve rebelled against God’s authority …

Not only according to YECs, but the clear teaching of
Genesis 1:30! I address this further here.

Ross continues:

Carnivorous activity (considered evil because it involves animal death),
they assumed, would have been one of the consequences of human sin.

No, we don’t consider it ‘evil’, because animals are not moral
agents, and it was God’s righteous judgment on the entire creation of which
Adam was the head. Even when Ross gets something right about what YECs believe,
he throws in a subtle distortion. Then he continues (pp. 122–123):

Based on this perspective, all meat-eating creatures alive now and evidence
in the fossil record must have evolved rapidly (in several hundred years or less)
from the plant eating creatures God made during the creation week. And since God
is no longer “creating”, they must have evolved strictly by natural
processes.

Here we have the usual claim about rapid evolution. But in many cases, very little
change would have been required to change a plant-eater into a meat-eater. In many
cases, it would require only a change in behaviour. In the Taronga Zoo bear exhibit
in Australia, 1999, a sign read:

Although all bears have teeth designed for eating meat, their diet consists
mainly of plants.

But maybe their teeth are designed perfectly well for what they do—eat plants—while
in this fallen world they are also good for eating animals sometimes.

And this skull (see picture) is of an animal classified as a ‘carnivore’
because of its teeth—yet it’s a fruit bat!

However, in other cases, information losses can result in an organism becoming
an obligate parasite—see Pathogens and creation.
We have also pointed out that some structures do seem to be designed for defense/attack.
In this case, there was no new design after Creation Week. Rather, God foreknew
the Fall, so He programmed creatures with the information for design features for
attack and defense that they would need in a cursed world. This information was
‘switched on’ at the Fall.

There should be no problem believing that the Master Programmer can switch information
on and off. After all, at conception, the fertilized
egg has all the information necessary to code for your physical potential. But skin
cells don’t express the information for blood, bones, muscles, eyes, etc.
So during the development of the embryo, as cells multiply, information is switched
off in an orderly manner. (The importance of stem cells
is that not all of the information is switched off).

The overloaded Ark of atheists and their compromising allies in the church

Ross says (p. 123):

A young-earth interpretation of the Genesis Flood exacerbates this speculated
speciation problem. According to this interpretation, a global deluge wiped out
all land-dwelling, air-breathing life on earth, except those pairs on board Noah’s
Ark, and all Earth’s fossils and geological features resulted from this relatively
recent cataclysmic event.

Of course, YECs believe that the Flood wiped out only animals that breathed through
nostrils (Genesis
7:22). So it didn’t wipe out insects or marine creatures off the
Ark, although many clearly perished. We explain this at How did the animals fit on Noah’s Ark? We also point
out that a number of fossils and features were the result of post-Flood catastrophes,
e.g. the woolly mammoths (that is, not all fossils
formed during the Flood).

Ross continues:

Even if all the animals aboard Noah’s Ark hibernated and did not drink
or urinate for the duration and recession of the Flood, the ark’s maximum
carrying capacity (by young-earth leaders’ estimates) would have been about
30,000 pairs of land animals [Ref. to The Genesis Flood, 1961!]

We point out that at most, 16,000 animals would have been needed, so there was plenty
of room to store food and water and take care of the waste products. Hibernation
was a possibility but not necessary. See again How did the animals fit on Noah’s Ark?

Ross’s preposterous fossil exaggerations

However, the fossil record documents the existence of a half billion species
or more [ref.].

This is preposterous, repeating a claim he made in his earlier book The Genesis
Question, which I address in Refuting Compromise ch. 8. Fact:
the actual number of fossil species recovered is only about 200,000. This includes just over 190,000 marine-invertebrate species,4
and about 10,000 species of fossil vertebrates.5 If
we correct for sampling bias, and even accommodate some uniformitarian assumptions
about past diversity of life, we project the existence of perhaps 1.2 million fossil
species.6 However, recent evidence shows that many
fossils that have been identified as different species are really the same species.
This means that the number of fossil species has been inflated by an estimated 32–44%.7 We can see that Hugh Ross exaggerates the number
of fossil species in the earth’s crust by a factor of at least 400!

However, such huge numbers are influenced by evolutionary bias, as is the common
evolutionary claim that 99% of species have become extinct. For evolution to be
true, there would have to have been innumerable transitional forms between different
types of creature. Therefore, for every known fossil species, many more must have
existed to connect it to its ancestors and descendents. This is yet another example
of evolutionary conclusions coming before the evidence. Really, the claim is an
implicit admission by evolutionists that large numbers of transitional forms are
predicted, which heightens the difficulty for evolutionists, given how few there
are that even they could begin to claim were candidates.

Ross’s use of evolutionary conjectures (about how many species may
once have lived) to attack the global Flood is ironic. This is because using these
numbers involves an implicit (if unwitting) acceptance of the very evolutionary
transformism which Ross spends so much time denying and attacking elsewhere. He
cannot have his cake and eat it, too.

The source of Ross’s astronomically-inflated numbers is the
husband and wife partnership Paul and Ann Ehrlich,8
who cite an antiquated (1952) number mentioned by George Gaylord Simpson. The latter
had casually ventured a guess at the number of species that had ever lived. The
Ehrlichs acknowledge that their guesstimate is ‘a ballpark guess’ (if
it even deserves to be dignified that much).

And it’s incredible that Ross would rely on such a demonstrably unreliable
source as the Ehrlichs. Paul, a butterfly specialist, is most famous for advocating
fanatical population control ideas, and for the falsified prophecies of doom by
mass starvation and resource depletion made in his 1968 book The Population Bomb.
But he and his wife still promote their radical ideas, including radical pro-abortion
policies. (See Melbourne Atheist: The Exterminator for
a refutation of ideas akin to the Ehrlichs.) It is unfortunate that Ross has accepted
this totally-conjectured number from this credibility-lacking source as ‘gospel
truth’, and presented it to his readers as such. Even worse, he has also failed
to accurately inform himself and his readers of the small actual number of fossil
species that have been discovered.

How many species?

Then Ross claims

At least 5 million species are alive on earth today [ref.], and at least
7 million lived in the era immediately after the Flood, as young-earth interpreters
date it.

This is most dogmatic. One scientist points out:

At the purely factual level, we do not know to within an
order of magnitude how many species of plants and animals we share the globe with:
fewer than 2 million are currently classified, and estimates of the total number
range from under 5 million to more than 50 million. At the theoretical level, things
are even worse: we cannot explain from first principles why the global total is
of the general order of 107 rather than 104 or 1010.9

Ross argues (p. 123):

The speciation problem intensifies from that point. Shortly after the Flood,
according to a young-earth perspective, many or most of the 30,000 species on board—dinosaurs,
trilobites, and others—went extinct.

Does Ross even know what a trilobite is? It was a marine creature, and
an invertebrate (did not breathe through nostrils)! Thus it was not
one of the passengers on board the Ark. As a bottom-dweller, it would have been
one of the first creatures to be buried, which explains why they are found so low
in the fossil record. Indeed, the Flood could have been responsible for their extinction.
There is nothing primitive about them—indeed, their eyes look like they were
designed by a master physicist (as indeed they were—see
Trilobite technology).

Ross’s bait-and-switch about Ark animals

In his persistent tactics to set up a straw man about what YECs believe, Ross makes
this claim (p. 123), again repeated from The Genesis Question:

So the remaining few thousand species must have evolved by extremely rapid,
hyperefficient natural processes into millions of species.

Ross has conflated (old) creationist estimates of the number of land vertebrate
species (a few thousand) with numbers of total species (millions). Obviously,
creationists don’t think that the land vertebrates gave rise to all species,
including the non-vertebrates, plants and microbes! It’s hard to believe that
these numbers were confused accidentally.

In fact, only about 2% of
the two million known extant species are vertebrates.10
This number is further reduced when the 25,000 marine vertebrates (mainly fish)11 and most of the four thousand amphibians12
are discounted, since God told Noah to take on board only land animals—marine
creatures don’t need preservation from a flood! So it is hardly startling
to believe that 8,000 kinds of land vertebrates represented on board the Ark could
give rise to the 11,000 living species, even if some of the Ark kinds have become
extinct.

‘Afraid of the Ages?’

This is a section heading on p. 124. It is a rehash of the headings in earlier books
like ‘fear of the millions’, but repeats the same claims after we have
shown them to be false (e.g. here):

Confidence in the superefficiency of biological evolution makes some young-earth
creationists’ refusal to consider other options on the time scale more comprehensible.
If Darwinian processes could work as smoothly and rapidly as they believe, a millions-
or billions-of-years-old earth would seem to remove any need for God’s involvement
in the creation and diversification of life—the opposite conclusion to the
one these Christians wholeheartedly intend to defend.

From a young-earth perspective, any concession that Earth or the universe
may be more than about 10,000 years old undermines the foundation of their faith—the
veracity of a core doctrine and of the Scriptures themselves. No wonder they so
strongly oppose anyone, even fellow Christians, who propose an ancient universe
and Earth [ref.]. The risks involved preclude an open-minded investigation of the
scientific and biblical evidence for Earth’s antiquity …’

This is nonsense. YECs oppose long ages because Scripture does! If Scripture taught
long ages, then that’s what we would believe. But if Scripture did so, then
how come no-one saw this until the rise of such ideas in ‘science’?
And those who talk so much about ‘open-minded investigation’ are closed
to the idea that Scripture should be the final authority on earth history, and that
scientific theories about the past must conform to this eyewitness record.

Also, Ross’s claim betrays a willing ignorance of creationist literature as
well as ignorance of evolution/variation, as shown above. Many years before Ross
wrote any of his books, leading creationists like Dr Duane Gish
made it very clear that they believed the earth was only thousands of years old,
on both biblical and scientific grounds. But Gish also strongly pointed out that
evolution would be impossible even if billions of years were granted, e.g.

Therefore, whether the earth is ten thousand, ten million,
or ten billion years old, the fossil record does not support the general theory
of evolution.13

Considering an enzyme, then, of 100 amino acids, there
would be no possibility whatever that a single molecule could have arisen by pure
chance on earth in five billion years.14

Further, the information-losing processes that creationists have repeatedly shown
to characterize the inherited changes in living things would make things worse for
evolution, not better, if more time were available. The accumulation of mutational
copying errors, and the culling of information by natural selection, leads populations
ever closer to extinction, not to uphill evolution. So if we are promoting matters
that logically imply that vast ages are the enemy of evolution, how can we be said
to be afraid of billions of years because they aid evolution?

Summary of Ross’s new claims about ‘young-earth Darwinism’

Ross’s new book A Matter of Days has nothing new of substance. Rather,
it’s a rehash of his old false claims about creationist teachings and motivation,
and a willing ignorance of the principles of variation within a kind. The only real
new thing is another case of sloppiness in Hebrew.

We have the biblically-required plurality of witnesses that in January 2004, Ross,
at a church in his native Canada, confidently announced several times that within
12 months of the publication of this new book the debate within the church about
the age of the earth would be finished in his favour. This will only happen if Christians
fail to check Ross’s claims against Scripture.

Gish, D.T., Evolution:
The Fossils Say No! Creation-Life Publishers, San Diego, CA, 2nd ed., p. 43,
1973. This book has been superseded by Evolution: The fossils STILL say NO!, Institute for Creation Research,
El Cajon, CA, USA, 1995, but the 1973 book shows that Ross’s claim has no
basis whatever. Return to text.

Gish, D.T., The origin of life: theories on the origin of biological
order, ICR Impact37:iii, 1976. Return
to text.

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